Weekly Recap

This week, we continued bringing more systems online as the Rutgers crew rigged up the F/V Defiance down in Cape May and the ODN team worked with George, Huanxin, and Joaquim to iron out a few kinks on vessels up on the North Shore and in Southern Maine. Thanks to Captains Chad, Rusty, and Dominic for their patience this week. Thanks also to everyone who has followed up with us after the cooperative research summit, the Lobster Town Hall, and the Mass Lobstermen’s Weekend. We received interest from over 30 new vessels and look forward to working with all of you.

Figure 1 – Captain Bill and Joey from the Rutgers install team walk through the displays on an eMOLT deckbox aboard the F/V Defiance earlier this week.

It’s cold out there, at least on the surface. The plot below shows sea surface temperature from the last four years as well as the anomaly relative to the time period from 2000-2020. This year, with the exception of the large warm ring around 64W, 40N it’s much colder than it’s been off the edge of the shelf. Thanks to Dr. Kim Hyde over in the Ecosystem Dynamics and Assessment Branch for sharing these images.

Figure 2 – (Top) Sea surface temperatures for late January / early February in (L-R) 2022-2025. Blue represents colder temps, red represents warmer temps. (Bottom) Sea surface temperature anomaly (difference from the 2000-2020 average) for late January / early February in (L-R) 2022-2025. Purple represents water that’s colder than average, yellow and orange are warmer than average.

As always, it’s helpful to have multiple pieces of data to be able to look at oceanographic conditions from different vantage points. Even with all that cold water at the surface, bottom conditions are actually much warmer in some places (see the magenta profile out on Eastern Georges where the temp around 100 fathoms is ~12 F warmer than the surface or the red profile near Hudson Canyon where temps are nearly 55 at the bottom, but only in the mid 40s at the surface).

This week, the eMOLT fleet recorded 193 tows of sensorized fishing gear totaling 1128 sensor hours underwater. The warmest recorded bottom temperature was 52.4 F inside Cape Cod Bay in approximately 65 fathoms (red profile) and the coldest recorded bottom temperature was 32.4 F near Hudson Canyon in approximately 7 fathoms (blue profile). Below, you can see these profiles plus a few other temperature profiles of interest across the region from the last week.

Figure 3 – Temperature profiles collected by eMOLT participants over the last week. The blue profile is where the coldest bottom temperature was measured and the red profile is where the warmest bottom temperature was measured. All other colors are assigned randomly. Colored points on the map indicate where profiles of the same color were collected. The small dark green dots represent other profiles collected this week, but not highlighted in the plot. Note that the warmest / coldest bottom temperatures measured could have occurred during gear soaks, which are not represented on this profile plot.

Finally, we just wanted to offer a quick thanks to Capt. Malcolm on the F/V Bulldog who provided some feedback on ways we could improve the graphics in these emails. We’ll see what we can do over the next few weeks. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to George directly or to other folks in the Cooperative Research Branch if you have a suggestion or request.

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